WARBURG — In the black hours after midnight, Jamie Sullivan sat in the lobby of the University of Alberta Hospital and waited to visit her four-month-old daughter in the morgue.

She knew Delonna was dead. The young RCMP officer had taken off his hat, pressed it to his chest, and told her so. Twice, because it didn’t sink in the first time.

She had flipped the kitchen table, knocked the pictures off the walls and shoved him again and again in a blind, sobbing rage. The hour-long drive to the hospital from her Warburg farmhouse was a blur.

It was April 12, 2011, and Delonna had been in foster care for just six days. She was a full-term baby, and she was healthy. While Sullivan waited at the hospital, she began to imagine there had been a mistake.

“It couldn’t be true,” she told herself over and over during the two-hour wait.

“That’s not my baby down there,” she thought. “That’s not my baby.”

Delonna Victoria Sullivan was born Nov. 23, 2010, on a cloudy afternoon when the temperature threatened to dip below zero, but never did.

Marilyn Koren hovered over her first grandchild while the nurses wiped her and weighed her at six pounds, 15 ounces, then put the swaddled newborn into her mother’s arms.

In a photo taken at the hospital, Jamie Sullivan is wearing a blue gown, her cheeks flushed, holding up her pink, sleeping baby for the camera. She is beaming.

The new family of two made their home in an old farmhouse outside Warburg, a blink-and-you-miss-it village surrounded by canola fields and pumpjacks rocking endlessly under the vast prairie sky.

The peeling linoleum revealed the creaking floorboards and the water-stained walls tipped in, but the rent was $600 a month, split with a roommate, and Sullivan was living on income support; her job driving truck was long gone, as was Delonna’s father.

Koren had been lucky at a garage sale, and found everything her granddaughter would need, including a crib, a playpen, and enough clothes for the next three years.

Sullivan made a sanctuary for them in her bedroom; the rest of the house was crowded with her roommate and her three children — a toddler and two teens. They were an ad hoc but happy family.

Four months after she brought Delonna home, Sullivan had a routine argument with her roommate’s 16-year-old daughter, and told her to take a walk. The girl hiked eight kilometres to town and moved in with a friend’s family. After a few weeks, the friend’s parents called Human Services and asked for money to pay the girl’s keep. The call triggered a visit from child welfare workers.

On Tuesday, April 5, 2011, the authorities drove up to the white farmhouse. Sullivan was stunned when her roommate surrendered her three children without a fight. She took Delonna into her own room and wept.

“The next thing I know I’ve got the cop knocking on my door saying I have to give them my baby, too,” Sullivan says. “I said ‘Excuse me? … I’m not giving you my child. There’s no way.’

Photo: Jamie Sullivan and her daughter, Delonna, were in this bedroom on Aug. 5, 2011, when child welfare authorities knocked on the door and said they had to apprehend the four-month-old. Credit: Ryan Jackson, Edmonton Journal.

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“But they told me ‘You can do this the easy way, or you can do it the hard way.’ And the hard way is they were going to handcuff me and drag me off to the police station.”

The child welfare workers had no apprehension order for Delonna, Sullivan says, and wouldn’t say why they were taking her. They took pictures of the house and accused Sullivan of hiding marijuana plants, which she denied.

She was consumed with panic.

“I’m supposed to be able to protect my baby,” she says. “Then I’m thinking, well, how am I going to be able to get my daughter back if I’m getting arrested? It’s just going to make things worse, isn’t it?

“I didn’t know what to do besides try to go with them to the office and get the whole big cruel joke dealt with, this big misunderstanding. It wasn’t real to me. It wasn’t real.”

Sullivan said caseworkers didn’t have a car seat for a four-month-old baby, so she insisted they take hers. At the Child and Family Services office in Leduc, they told Sullivan she had an alcohol addiction and that she’d have to attend a treatment program and arrange a home inspection.

Sullivan denied any addiction, but seeing no other option, she called and made an appointment for the next day.

When it came time to leave, she cried so hard the caseworker wouldn’t let her hold Delonna while she said goodbye.

On Friday, three days later, Sullivan and Koren went to court and learned they would have a one-hour visit with Delonna that afternoon.

When she arrived, Sullivan rushed to her daughter and held her close.

She says she immediately knew the baby was sick. Delonna was lethargic, had severe diarrhea, and an angry diaper rash. She had a scratch on her ear and red marks on her head.

Sullivan and Koren asked the foster mother and the caseworker to take Delonna to see a doctor.

They never did.

Photo: Delonna Sullivan was just four months old when she died in April 12, 2011. She had been apprehended from her mother, Jamie Sullivan, by Alberta child welfare officials just six days earlier. Credit: Supplied.

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On Monday, three days later, Delonna’s foster mother put her down for a nap at 10:30 a.m.

Medical records show she heard the baby at 2 p.m., and went to check on her at 3:30 p.m., five hours after she had put her down.

Delonna was cold and blue.

The 911 call came in at 3:43 p.m. Paramedics arrived nine minutes later and found the baby on the kitchen counter, the foster mother doing CPR.

Their working diagnosis was asphyxiation. They scooped up Delonna and continued CPR in the ambulance, they suctioned her airway, tried a defibrillator. Nothing worked.

Delonna arrived at the Stollery Children’s Hospital at 4:04 p.m. Doctors briefly treated her for cardiac arrest. They pronounced her dead at 4:17 p.m.

Hospital staff prepared two bereavement kits, which included Delonna’s handprints and footprints. They gave one to the foster mother. They gave the second to the child welfare workers, to be delivered to the birth mother.

Sullivan never received it.

Sullivan was the last to learn her baby was dead.

That day, she had driven to Edmonton for her addiction treatment program and then drove home, unaware.

She went to bed early, because she had a 9 a.m. court hearing in the city the next day, and she was hoping to get her daughter back.

While she was settling in for the night, RCMP officers were tracking down her mother. They asked Koren to come with them to tell her daughter what had happened.

Koren crept into her daughter’s bedroom around 10:30 p.m.

“Jamie, there are some people here to see you,” Koren said quietly, through sobs.

Sullivan got out of bed and walked into the living room. She saw her mother’s boyfriend, two victim services workers, and two RCMP officers.

She remembers the younger one took his hat off, and pressed it to his chest.

After that, her memory goes dark.

The autopsy was conducted the following day.

Medical examiner Graeme Dowling ruled the cause of death was sudden unexpected death in infancy.

He noted Delonna had been left to sleep in an infant carrier with a loose blanket on top of her, and that it was covering the lower half of her face when she was found.

“Although there were no findings at autopsy or in the scene reconstruction to indicate that the infant had its airway obstructed in any way, the infant’s sleep environment was not completely safe in that she had been placed to sleep in an infant carrier,” Dowling wrote.

Experts recommend babies sleep on firm mattresses in bare cribs, a practice that reduces the chance of sudden unexpected death in infancy.

In Alberta, ministry rules require that foster babies have their own cribs, and policy requires caseworkers to warn foster parents of increased SIDS risk created by using blankets. The rules are silent on babies napping in car seats.

Dowling also found “therapeutic levels” of acetaminophen and cough syrup in the four-month-old’s blood. In 2008, Health Canada recommended against giving cold and cough medicines to children under six. In 2011, the Canadian Pediatric Society issued a statement saying that for children, over-the-counter cold and cough medicine “is not effective in most cases and is potentially harmful.”

Alberta child welfare policy manual says only that medication must be “taken appropriately” and under adult supervision. It provides no further guidelines for foster parents, and does not distinguish between babies and older children.

“As with any medication for any child, regardless of age, caregivers are required to follow the medication instructions,” ministry spokeswoman Kathy Telfer said. “If the cough medicine is not to be used with children under six, the caregiver would not be allowed to give it to a baby or toddler.”

The policy also says that medication use “must be monitored by a primary care physician.” Delonna never saw a doctor.

Telfer did not comment on the consequences if a foster parent fails to follow the rules.

No charges were laid in connection with Delonna’s death. A fatality inquiry has been called, but is not yet scheduled. The internal report detailing the circumstances of Delonna’s death is five pages long, makes no mention of the medication in her system, and provides no recommendations to prevent future deaths.

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Sullivan still doesn’t know why her daughter was apprehended. She denies any allegations that she was addicted to drugs or alcohol. She maintains that child protection workers had no apprehension order and no car seat, and believes Delonna simply got swept up with her roommate’s children.

She won a court application to lift the publication on her daughter’s name, in hopes of bringing attention to what happened.

Human Services declined to comment on the case, citing privacy and legal concerns.

“This was a very sad situation. When a child dies suddenly, we all grieve,” Telfer said in an email. “This matter is currently before the courts, and therefore it would not be appropriate to comment on or respond to any allegations.”

Sullivan and Koren want to see someone held accountable for Delonna’s death, and in the absence of criminal charges, they have launched a $2.5-million lawsuit. It is cold comfort.

“It’s like taking and holding little baby Delonna up in the air and saying: “What’s she worth? A million? Two-and-a-half million? Five million? No,” Koren says, spitting out the words.

“Babies are not for sale.”

They served the lawsuit papers themselves.

One caseworker told them she thinks about the baby every day. Another looked as though she would cry. A third - the one who apprehended Delonna and didn’t agree to take her to a doctor — did cry when Koren thrust the papers in her hand.

Photo: Jamie Sullivan and her daughter, Delonna, were in this bedroom on Aug. 5, 2011, when child welfare authorities knocked on the door and said they had to apprehend the four-month-old. Credit: Ryan Jackson, Edmonton Journal.

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Delonna was buried in a pink satin casket trimmed with white lace and stargazer lilies. Her obituary noted she had never seen the beauty of a summer day.

When Sullivan thinks about her last moments with her daughter, it is those black hours after midnight on April 12, 2011.

Sullivan and Koren walked down the stairs together, past a big sign for the morgue, into a sepulchral sitting room. Delonna was lying in a bassinet.

Sullivan walked over and picked up Delonna’s body. She rocked her back and forth, whispering “They did this to you, they did this to you.”

Sullivan clung to her daughter. “I died in that room that day,” she says. “There ain’t nothing left in me anymore, except for want to see these people pay.

“I want to see them in jail, and that’s not even enough. It will never be enough.”

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